


On the Illusions of Stardust and Childhood

by ewfte



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Incomplete, Minor Original Character(s), Multi, Origin Story, Weapon of the Times, starkraving
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 07:10:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8362414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ewfte/pseuds/ewfte
Summary: Inspired by starkraving's 'Weapon of the Times'.
"The ways the story changes are minuscule at first, a millionth of a millimeter off center. One life saved in the middle of a massacre, an absence of a last minute breeze and the solid crack of a bullet slamming into a training post. But even the slightest mistake of destiny blinds the prophets."
In this world, the agents designated codenames Washington and Maine never achieve Freelancer status. Here, Louisiana burns and falls when Epsilon tears itself apart. Here, California chases his old partner in pursuit of AI and a Helljumper and a mercenary in stolen MJOLNIR armor clear insurrectionists from the outer rings.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Weapon of the Times - I](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059083) by [starkraving](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving). 



Here is how it stays the same.

You are a runaway, an orphan, a foster kid, and a fucking bastard as fist swings towards your face. You learn early how to disappear, how to tag a few steps behind an unknowing family and how to walk instead of run when under inspection. You keep your eyes open and broken bits of metal or serrated blades in your pockets. There are many children who live on the edges of civility throughout the galaxy, there a millions of parents muttering of parasites to the lips of beer bottles. Children like you learn early that they are at fault for imagined disaster, wide eyed and bony little antichrists in the religion of abuse.

You are still called to court in a suit jacket that hangs off you in excess over a thin white t-shirt. There is a hole in the sleeve right over where a larger child's wrist would hang. You shove your thumb in it twenty minutes into the case and worry at gap until you can fit your other hand's pinkie finger on top of your thumb. You are eleven years old and were found by your next door neighbor, petting her cat Lily with a spray of arterial blood set deep in your ragged clothes and dried in the crevices of your face tears and shaking hands hadn't wiped away. You think you probably could have managed to get your ring finger in the hole too but the lawyer pulls you away from the concrete bench and out the tiny room. In five minutes you will stand shoulder to hip in front of a flashing vending machine. In seven minutes you have off brand M&Ms for the first time, flecks of color dotting your palms, a crackle of white shell between your teeth and a bead of smooth chocolate on your tongue. In four hours and thirty-eight minutes the jury finds you not guilty of first degree patricide on account of the quarter-sized bruises wrapping your neck in an inverted, yellow-green fist.

Six years, seventeen counts of shoplifting, twenty-two counts of vandalism, two counts of armed robbery, thirteen counts of assault, and with a new forged I.D., you, David Seattle, join the United Nation Space Council Marine Corps with no blemishes to your name.

Here is how everything repeats.

There is a flash clone that lies to rest in a distant colony's cemetery under a tombstone with another dead boy's name on it. There are grieving parents morning the UNSC's transgressions that they will never knew killed little boys and girls in any other way than tearing them apart on Insurrection and Covenant bullets. A mother sells her wedding dress much sooner than she had planned for a more modest black garment. She only gets to wear it once before the entire planet is seared on an alien's prophet's orders. If you remembered a life before buzz cuts and backhands you would be grateful a set of parents carefully wiped from your existence had died from initial orbital bombardment, were seared away from existence as plasma lances struck earth like streaks of nuclear lightening. You would be glad they did not writhe with radioactive burns or choke on lechatelierite dust carving their lungs to bloody slabs. You would be glad for knowing about them even in the past tense.

But the paradox of space-time still drowns your body in thick, nutrient rich fluid and smothers your post death exhalation with a swarm of tubes feeding oxygen to a dead brain and vitamins to dead cells. Two years after you die of cardiac arrest and shock on a metal table, spasming as you try to keep up with the endless rush of norepinephrine and your spinal cord desperately locking pain gates up to your brain to curb the void of pure fucking anguish burning black and white at the front of your mind. You are fourteen when you die because _it hurts so fucking badly_.

You wake up and die again at epileptic pace as poorly granted scientists in a backwater planet conduct semi-illegal experiments with the corpses of fourteen-year old children. It is a constant debate in your later life if you were the luckiest one for surviving or the lucky ones passed without any memory of pain as regenerative fluid electrified then fried their brains to charred grey matter instead of igniting it like yours with the phantom burns of last memories. However, by some predestined twist of the odds, you scream your second living breath out of a throat full of plastic tubes and into the thick mass of bio-gel that makes up your new world. For an immeasurable amount of time, your home is in the liquid while your body fluctuates wildly between snapping in angry muscles spasms and floating idly in the submerged mindset of an officially charged medical coma; the latter state feels to you like resting just below the surface of an oily lake, feeling your lungs burn from deprivation as your frontal cortex burns with dulled pain, and trying to wait out the fire that’s burning its way just above your body. It's hell, easily put. It’s the best preparation for another hell waiting for you in pockets of deep space where men are fighting a war they have no chance of winning. The burn of now is a precursor to plasma beams and pyroclastic surges in the wakes of bombs and biofoam in places where intestines should go.

You are an anomaly. Very few men get to come back from the dead, SPARTAN. Even less could survive the military careers you partake in. But then again, you were built to survive and you are used to it. You are used to following orders screamed at you, beaten into you, chanted in the pulsating warning sirens that announce your heart has stopped, repeated scornfully by a women just on the edge of memory. SPARTANs learn early on to walk off injuries that would leave their squad screaming into insanity or death, whichever came first. You were built to be a SPARTAN, Moses-056. You failed the moment your gigantic heart shuddered and clenched in spastic electrical circuits, but damn if the people who didn't look twice at stealing babies will let that prevent you from a life of war.

And again.

There is decisive split in the story of you, you savage, backwater trash. You like the second part the best, as it is truly your story and not full of ancient ideals and the laws of fucking hicks. One is her story, and you love her even as you leave her alone, and the other is how you were born on a recruitment ship bringing minors to the most extreme military prep academy in the world. That's what the officer told your uncle at least, you believe a more accurate term is "bootcamp of Satan". Let's tell her story first, just to be chronological, and we might see how you evolved into the vicious creature you are.

She's born during monsoon time on a planet labeled LO-276 in UNSC records somewhere, but rarely mentioned in anything other than the census. It was discovered on one of the inner circle planets, those who actually got names and some form of government instead of mob justice. The astronomer who happened to find LO-276 in the 70 Ophiuchi system had already attached her name to a slightly oval body roughly twice the size of earth and in perfect condition to begin terraforming. She did not have the time designate a term like "Helsinki" or "Kahlo" to the small planet barely passing under the environmental requirements for terraforming and passing too close to its orange dwarf star to have proper seasons other than terribly fucking hot. The astronomer tagged the body by its parallax and surrounding spectral types before logging it low priority and returning to the pursuit of something worthwhile.

A loose gang of self declared space pirates intercepted the data drop and decided to put their recently grabbed atmospheric processors to work in the construction of a planetary base for smuggling. Unfortunately for most of the pirates, they underestimated the amount of time and power required to completely construct a new atmosphere even without spallation-heavy mantle additions, and were blown out of the air by ex-UNSC mercenaries hunting the sizeable bounty on the gang's cargo. Fortunately for the pirates, while being ejected at Mach 2 in very rudimentary escape pods is not a pleasant experience, dropping from low atmo in a considerably cheap knock off but still semi legally certified pod is better than nothing. Most of the crew survived, minus those who landed and promptly sunk into the hydrogen rich pits of green mud stretched like quicksand across the planet's surface, and managed to scavenge enough from the initial crashes and infrequent drops of scrap that slowly tipped out of the atmosphere into the waiting depths of gravity. And survive they did, as the clan scrounged the barely-hospitable land filled a with bit too much with oxygen for bugs to be of fucking decent size and overgrown like a scene from an ancient Jurassic documentary. Those who didn’t find a home in the swelter of sea green canopies and ever constant pressure of gravity escaped back to the skies in the next ship that docked, or hailed in by distress signals and high jacked.

Gradually, over centuries and little to no contact with inner colonies, or time to deal with their goddamn rebellions, LO-276 flourished like a persistent weed under the heavy cement of environmental problems its colonists were too damned stubborn to avoid. Primarily, the light burn of radiation the dying K type star gave off but other issues of inbreeding in the planet's early history and, mostly fueled by the constant bombardment of beta waves, the debilitating after-effects of centuries worth of gene flips still persisted. She's lucky, as recessive genes flip in such a away she is brought into the world with no cleft palate or extra toes. She does manage to inherit the stunning, but deemed unsightly by inner colony standards, heterochromia while breaking free of other genetic flip standards of bleach blonde hair and vitiligo. The girl screams her first lung full of too-humid air into the ear of a mother who abso-fucking-lutely did not want to deal with another child and into the emptiness where a father should be (he is dying the moment she is born, burning bright and baking in a SOEIV unit that will slam into a planet in the middle of glassing).

She lives under the watchful shrieks of a mother strung out on the edge of civility by moonshine and presided over by neighbors who are all second cousins something removed. The chemical reek of homemade stills and rancid sweet smoke of native weeds are the background flavor of life on LO-276, sinking deep into the wood of shacks and burrowing into displaced swamp water. Candidly put, the glen overshadowed by stilt houses and ratty tarps draped off burned out thrusters smells like shit and the occasional reek of something dying. She is the one sent to either lug the unfortunate creature towards the acid green pools of scum to sink out of sight and smell or burn it if it is too much for a six year old to drag. Her brother is better off as he works under construction, meaning he gets to try hillbilly moonshine at age ten and laze around under the influence of beer, pot, and a sense of male superiority.

When she hits the age of six, you are not officially born but known in the world she whispers to swampy hazes at night. The two of you wrap so snugly in each other's bodies it would be impossible to separate who begins without the use of names, or the unspoken societal preference for assigned gender on genitalia. She is already unfortunate and would be doomed to a life of entropy and teenage pregnancy if not for an unreasonably high IQ and genetic predisposition for athletic prowess. You would be buried deep without the intervention of the apathetic third party of the UNSC. You would have hidden under skin and expectations, under future beatings and ostracism so you are grateful in one way for military intervention in your situation, no matter how unintentional on their part.

You are born at age six and a half on a medical record stating your induction into the SPARTAN III Gamma training program. Here is what you bring from LO-267: a rucksack made from chicken feed bags, two pairs of stained, by engine grease and chili respectively, shorts, one threadbare shirt two sizes too large, your brother's thoroughly washed and newest boxers, five mismatched socks, a rat skull, hair oil, a grimy data pad with the complete edition of Sherlock Holmes, the Oxford Dictionary, and Machiavelli’s Prince, a length of your mother's lime green ribbon, your great grandfather's pocket knife (previously bestowed upon your brother), the knowledge of how to use said pocket knife, cook a mean gumbo, write in cursive, sew, dodge glass bottles, and your family name. Most of what lies in the chicken feed bag is stolen from your family, including the bag itself Here is what the UNSC gives you the minute you set foot on that pelican: your first breath of filtered oxygen, the very first record of your name in the entire galaxy, the name Cayman (you give yourself this but with circumstance it is a gift), the name Cay-G056 (they give this one to you), freedom, a chance, a future. Then they send you to war.

Again.

There is nothing remarkable about you, little boy. You grow up in a family of seven a floor down from your grandparents and across the hall from your mother's sister. As a child, you remember piling into the back of an unremarkable grey car to drive from the outskirts of the Seoul Capital Area towards the West shore of the island for family days. Your city is described as boring by a future version of you with too much time on his hands and too much rage boiling under his skin. However, you are a ten year old who smiles with eyes clamped shut in sharp crows feet from the ferocity of your grin. The crime rate of Incheon falls with every successive year while the economy skyrockets. Korea is the largest center for the production of cybernetics by the time you hit thirteen, the same year you finally get your second degree black belt after two years of training.

You are a fine child with clean fingers that never brushed items you desperately wanted into your sleeves. Mom holds your hand when you let her and your older sister teaches you Mandarin and where to punch a man in the back to break his floating ribs into his abdominal cavity. You feel a gruesome thrill at this information, but never use it until much later and much farther from home.

How exactly did you turn into the person you are today, little boy? The one whose eyes stay shining and unlined over more a sneer than a smile. You are made of more razor blades and titanium shells in the future, a whole man never touched by the cybernetics of his home but still filled with jagged edges and machinated processes. There was once a time where you knew an inner peace among the green swells of hills and glittering blue of high rise windows. Now you beg for the jagged adrenaline terrors of war, for a metallic reek or alien acidic bite of blood from either side, for the acrid stink of gunpowder and lightning sting in your teeth from plasma.

Here is how you evolve:

Your sister joins the Marines and sends you pictures of herself smiling the same smile you used to, one without fear or inhibitions and showing both brilliant white lines of her teeth. She is wearing Hell Jumper armor and slouches with a modded MA5 on her hip. God she's grinning like fucking Icarus and Achilles and Heracles. She's laughing in these recollections like a fucking immortal god, with good reason. The majority of her squad has survived all three deployments and four drops in the human-covenant war. You are irrationally proud of her, giddy when she shows you her new tattoo of a Type-5 Plasma rifle crossed with her personal MA5 (she's named her gun Ass Cactus and cackles with her friends on the vid mail about skull fucking grunts with it).

This goes on for a good year. Your heart swells with every mention of her and you are so fucking proud of your older sister. You never see the bad days when half her squad is blown out of space with covvie anti-aircraft guns, when her hands are slick with bright red blood and her fingers fumble on a bio-foam pen to save a kid two years older than you, when a needler round hits her right in left hip, fracturing her ilium and requires two hours of intensive surgery to fix. You can almost see the remainders of the horror of war, in scars and bruises and trembles, but she keeps her grin impossibly large for you, little boy. She's running on wings of gold and god bestowed power. This is why it comes as a surprise to you when she dies.

You remember the day in flashbulb memory, embedded in your brain in epileptic flashes of pain through the day. It begins when the pollution level rises above recommended levels and you wear a scarf on top of your white mask, despite the heat. The summer in Seoul is filled with yellow smog and unbearable humidity. Bodies crowd in metro and compress you into a sweat slicked pale shadow of a boy. It’s too hot and no one makes a noise and somewhere a child's cries wail on like sirens. You look forward to home in a way desert travellers gasp for water; the required school sweater scratches your skin and smothers you while beads of water drip down your spin in sticky spider webs.

Seomun Louise "call me Lou" Mi-ran is designated collateral damage in a low atmo nuclear bombardment of a suspected covenant supply line.

See, you have always had the base, the seed, of what you will become. There is a drop of moral nihilism in you from the beginning, little boy, a speck of psychopathy and a germ of deceit. It’s not apparent to those close to you, it is not even found by you until it comes raging to the forefront of your mind under the boiling pressure of grief. Your sister probably knew. Lou never had knives for teeth but compensated with blunt force. When you grow up you are wild like her, hanging onto violently ecstatic threads of thought. Your mother bit her tongue between her back molars the same way you two will, her father before her chased after images of broken bones and bar fights with the light in his eyes whenever he was sober. Your youngest sister, both her children, and your eldest cousin will all find strange semi-delight in tragedy. However, not all of them will not run straight into war, they will never deaden their sense of empathy with revenge and over exposure to violence.

You begin life with a genetic predisposition towards antisocial personality disorder but never fully inhabit the listed traits of psychopathy. There will be a constant argument between historians and military personnel looking at the scars of destruction in your files on whether or not you have the disease. Your grandfather and both nieces are confirmed to, your cousin dies in a non-violent protest before he turns eighteen. You would personally refute classification, unless it benefited you. The truth of the matter lies in the beginnings of your life. Sixteen years old and you have a solid life of experience on how to laugh and what is funny, how to get people to like you, and how to make them love you. At seventeen your dearest sister dies, you get snakebites and a tongue piercing, you captain the debate team. At age eighteen you buy a near perfect replica of a K bar and spend your first month with it chucking it haphazardly against a sandbag on your apartment roof, your debate team places first at nationals on the issue of military ethics, you get accepted to Seoul National University, you join the UNSC marines.

You shave half your head the day you leave home with a duffle bag full of grandma's homemade moon cakes and the rest of your family's disapproval. You make sure your middle name is sewn onto the tag of your new uniform, just like your sister's was. She was always so proud of you, Felix; in fact you were the reason she went to war in the first place, to keep you safe. You couldn't resist throwing yourself right into the tragedy she fought to keep you out of, could you?

The ways the story changes are minuscule at first, a millionth of a millimeter off center. One life saved in the middle of a massacre, an absence of a last minute breeze and the solid crack of a bullet slamming into a training post. But even the slightest mistake of destiny blinds the prophets. This life is not a Greek myth. The fates do not weigh our strings and color in the lines of our lives. You children, of all people know the cold metal snick of shears and have lived, persevered, by a single strand, obstinate even towards death. So this is how it changes.

A smile. A loophole. A point. An inch.

**Author's Note:**

> This is an unfinished draft I found lying around in my RVB folders. I stopped working on it months ago, but I can continue if at a later date if people are interested. This story was mostly for myself, so I am of course still interested in how it's going to end, but just need some motivation if I am to finish.


End file.
